An Empty Storefront on Sophienstrasse
Some trips are meant to celebrate. This one was meant to celebrate twice over: my birthday and our anniversary, wrapped into one long weekend in one of our favorite corners of the Black Forest, Germany. Our destination? The beloved spa town of Baden-Baden – equal parts elegance and ease, the kind of place where a stroll through the Lichtentaler Allee feels like its own small luxury. Need I say more …
As the story goes, a former U.S. president once joked that “Baden-Baden is so nice, they had to name it twice.” And I could not agree more.
This year, our timing lined up beautifully with the 49th annual Baden-Baden Oldtimer car show.
Even for someone who typically cares more about the color and comfort of a car than its horsepower, wandering among row upon row of gleaming, meticulously restored decades-old automobiles is truly but one reason to visit this picturesque spa town, which offers first-class hotels, scenic hiking trails, a world-famous casino and spa, and, until recently, a wonderfully surprising shopping experience. But this trip also handed me a small, quiet surprise – the kind that only a fellow Hermès devotee might fully understand.
Sophienstrasse has long been considered Baden-Baden’s own little “Fifth Avenue” – a short but impressive stretch of elegant boutiques tucked into the tree-lined pedestrian heart of the city. On past visits, I always made a point of walking past the Hermès boutique there, even when I was not in a shopping mood, just to admire the windows or say hello to the very friendly staff.
This time, the windows were papered over. The boutique was gone.
As it turns out, Hermès quietly closed its Baden-Baden location at the end of 2025, part of a broader consolidation of its German footprint. Where the brand once operated close to twenty boutiques across the country, that number has shrunk to just a handful – with Hermès increasingly concentrating its investment in a small number of major luxury corridors: Hamburg’s Neuer Wall, Munich’s Maximilianstrasse, Berlin’s Ku’damm (Kurfürstendamm), and similar addresses in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. Smaller resort-town boutiques, even in a place as storied as Baden-Baden, have simply not been part of that strategy going forward.
Of course, back at the hotel, I had to do a little “research” as to why the fashion house chose to close this particular location. What I found was not really a story of Hermès pulling back, but rather one of Hermès trading breadth for depth. This is, after all, a house reporting real growth – recent double-digit revenue increases even in a soft luxury market. Rather than maintaining a wide scattering of smaller boutiques across every charming resort town, Hermès appears to be consolidating into fewer, larger, more immersive flagships in cities with the highest concentration of shoppers and tourists.
To my relief, my other two favorite Hermès boutiques – on Pařížská in Prague, Czech Republic, and in Florence, Italy – were, as of this writing, still very much in existence, and Florence’s is apparently more spectacular than ever: in February 2025, Hermès closed its original 1991 boutique on Via de’ Tornabuoni only to open something far grander just around the corner on Via degli Strozzi – a two-level, 300-square-meter space inside a restored 16th-century Renaissance palazzo, complete with frescoed ceilings and a curated collection of artwork. (already on my next “to do list”… :-))
So the fashion house is not downsizing so much as reshuffling: fewer doors, but more impressive ones for certain.
A Familiar Feeling for Collectors
There is something particular about standing in front of a shuttered boutique that once meant something to you personally. It is not just a business closing – it is a small piece of a tradition disappearing. For those of us who collect vintage carrés and treasure the history behind each design, watching physical boutiques quietly recede from smaller towns feels like watching one more thread of that history fade, even as the designs themselves live on in our collections, and in stories exchanged between collectors around the world.
Where We Landed Instead
Despite the closed boutique, Baden-Baden gave us exactly what we came for: a birthday, an anniversary, gleaming vintage cars parked in front of the iconic Baden-Baden casino, and the particular calm that only a proper spa town can offer. We wandered, we celebrated, and yes, I walked one more time past the papered-over windows at Sophienstrasse – saddened that a chapter was now closed.
If you are planning your own visit and hoping to shop for Hermès while there, you will need to adjust your itinerary – Stuttgart is now your closest stop. But Baden-Baden itself remains every bit as lovely as it always was, oldtimer cars and all.
Have you visited Baden-Baden recently? I would love to hear whether you noticed the same changes along Sophienstrasse – or whether you have your own favorite boutique-hopping route through this small but iconic town.
*The E. Braun name lives on
E. Braun & Co. wasn’t just a random boutique – it operated locations in Munich, Berlin, and Baden-Baden, and was among Germany’s most distinguished fashion retailers, carrying labels like Hermès, Chanel, Dior, and Valentino. The Baden-Baden connection dates back to 1952 and today the elegant store can be found at Kurhaus Colonnades No. 17a still offering timeless women’s fashion in stylish surroundings.
Vintage Hermès scarves with E. Braun labels and a listing in an early Le Monde d’Hermès magazine